Day 3969 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Jeremiah 31:33 NIV

Set apart

This is the pursuit of what is that standing command to be holy as He who created us in His image is the same as is the Son who came in our image to show us a reflection of what could have been, what should have been had we been not what we’d become but had rather stayed who, how, what, where we were made. For we were made in His image, a process with the purpose for our to be His children and He to be our Father and thus all, as sons and daughters, to be found living as sisters and brothers who’ve not then all this reason for doubt and debate that we find instead these days.

Where does it come from?

Why do we stay wherever this is that it’s led us to be as whoever it’s caused us to become?

When will we see that who we are, where we are is not where, who He created us to be, calls us to stay, intends for us to stay?

How better can we comprehend the necessity of that coming day upon which no more days will come thereafter as time will at last lie shattered upon the floor of a Garden in which time wasn’t growing in the thought of He who created life to exist as His life exists, which is beyond time, space, limit than His having both allowed for our limits unto time, space, existence in what is a world that all but demands it due to the sin sown and shown inside?

What else could He have done but send the Son to make sin run at the mere sound of His Name thanks to His frame having taken the blame for what we became, removing there the sting of death itself so that all who are His will be found unto eternal life at the loss of what He’s proven was a life lived barely living as He hung in that place that we’d all but begged to stay?

Indeed, why stay worldly when He says we can be holy, and in this set apart from the common commonalities of a collapsing community of such chaos, confusion, distrust, doubt, disillusion that we spend out our days wandering throughout the ways in which to look like, sound like, think like, live like what is a world that we’re right on schedule to leave behind before we know it thanks to His promise to come as if a thief in the night to turn all this darkness to light and prove there and then finally the fullness of the fright of those who gave their lives to living as if He isn’t?

Is that who we want to be, how we want to live? Just lost in this place in which so much happens that shouldn’t happen at all? Seeking, scrambling to find some shelter from the fall, some solace inside the screaming mixed of shouts of joy and the bitterness of all human anguish? Can we truly look at life for whatever it’s become and remain so certain that we do know what we’re doing and needn’t any help whatever? Can we not see the beauty to be found in coming apart from a society coming down?

And that both in action as in the general collapsing but so too word and thought as are anymore so leavened up that everyone’s always only looking down on those around them in what’s then a life lived as if life’s lived only to either compare or condemn?

Again, is that all there is to life?

Well, the truth would seem to say that such is what we’ve all assumed life to be. For anymore all we seem able to assume is such concepts as selfishness and vanity and the swelling hostility of such ever-growing insanities. Every day it’s as if all we hear is either about how hard life is or how unfair life is or how mean life is all built upon and based within this measuring of mankind’s apparent mastery of life met alongside an inability to make it known because of those who seem to know of something else found only some other way.

And in this we find ourselves as what is but not one chicken running around looking for its head but rather an entire million acre farm of such futility as trying to find what we can’t see we ourselves chose to lose.

And honestly, what chicken would choose to lose its very own head?

But, in truth, we are the ones who picked to pass upon the betterment of sight as we instead chose to scramble into the night looking for a safe place to hide what are now lives that are themselves so dark that we can neither see who we’ve come to be and thus no reason not to stay apparently. Rather we all seem quite convinced that the very best thing for us to ever consider doing is nothing more than whatever we already have as had led us to whatever we are.

A reality that I dare say we honestly don’t know.

For again, how could we having proven both those who are blind but are such willingly?

And furthermore, why continue to so trust in ourselves alone when we’re the ones who won’t pick up the phone that’s ringing off the hook hung on what is a heart that’s tired of trying to convince its stone-like self to beat, a phone that’s calling with Hope himself on the other end of the line just trying whatever He can to still come and find whomever He might before this day turns back into night and there this life heading back to both wherever we chose to aim it but also toward He who created it to not be so lived as if we know what’s best.

Which happens to be the lie that lives inside what are hearts that now just need to be removed thanks to all the deception and decay we’ve let have their way and therein define our own.

Which happens to be still the overarching goal for most in this place:

To just live their lives their way.

But friends, what is our way? I mean, unless we’re all still able to factor our age using only fingers and hands then we’ve been around long enough, and in this done enough, to have realized that life isn’t something that we can even understand, let alone approach as if we can somehow control. All of us have tried hard for a long time to prove those facts otherwise, but that’s the point.

It’s that we’ve tried this our way long enough and I think it’s time we stop and spend some time with what we’ve found and what that means and what it’s caused that we’ve perhaps not seen.

Willingly.

Such as why the Law is necessary. And why the Christ came to both fulfill it for us and yet in this seemingly only both complicate it more while also simplifying it completely. And how His fulfillment of the Law of Moses shouldn’t be seen as some kind of onus to spend out the rest of our days letting still our sinful ways own us. And how our having been owned by sin shouldn’t be then the way we continue walking in thanks to Him proving once for all that all deserve to die but yet in Him only have to do it once.

Not the twice we truly deserve.

Just once.

And yet in our “understanding” we see this as something unkind, unfair, unloving. Rather we seem to believe that the God who created the Law which was written for our benefit of growing in holiness, which is the setting apart of something to be marked for special use, the same God who we then refused, and sadly continue to, might have some reason to be upset. To be angry. To be disappointed. To be so sickened by what His children had become what He became intent upon the uncreation thereof.

Indeed, we live as if God deserves to see our enjoyment of what we’ve become inside these hearts so numb that minds grow dumb by the day to any way that isn’t our own.

All as if our way is still paying the dividends that we just can’t deny.

But that’s the ongoing question in both these posts and this life:

What are we reaping that has us still reaching not for God, not for hope, not for healing, not for love, joy, purpose, patience, humility, help or meaning but rather for just another day spent reeling in more of what’s become more important than all of those somehow?

And indeed, how has anything else managed to become of more enjoyment, more meaning, more importance than such promises as forgiveness, mercy, grace and the goodness of a God who gives them all to all without hesitation?

Why do we think a life lived without a law to lead is somehow to prove better able to get us anywhere better? If not simply because of the little we do know, and actually seem to actually understand, there’s found this knowing that all law comes in only to make for the evidence of it being trespassed, transgressed, turned down and that to regress away from the way it was intended to lead?

But friends, how can one be freed from a life lived lawlessly if not by the giving of a law meant unto the reminding of the better aim we were made to have?

Does He not need to help us see how badly we’ve been living if He’s ever to inspire us to live life better?

Is that not the message of the cross?

That the way of life we’d been living, perhaps are living still, had earned only so much death that it won only the experiencing of something that nobody can survive?

But then again, I suppose that such a sight is hard to see unto those who are still stuck living as if the Law is nothing more than some undue limitation unto a life’s enjoyment. And, well, sadly our enjoyment seems to still matter more to us than the opportunity to be His people and He our God and Heaven our home and peace our hope.

Nope. Those things can’t matter whenever we continue to live as a people all our own who think themselves as gods alone in a place that we live to love to call our home simply because it’s filled with all we’ve come to love more than He who is the Life, and that despite how there is no peace here.

And that because, in what is a truly ironic turn of events, we’ve come only to invent this intent to wage war by the hour against any and all who threaten our sense of power and prestige as are both won only in popularity. Simply because that’s all that matters anymore. Just our feeling as if we fit in and are thus loved by those among whom we walk.

Not that we even pretend we have anything in common with such loners and losers as we’re definitely better at living life than everyone else is. Just because we need someone to lord it over, someone to impress, someone to then suggest that we’re amazing and pretty and strong and whatever.

All because such are the testaments we look for in life. Not those of life but rather just those of our selfish addendums unto it.

Such as vanity. Wealth. Lust. Idolatry.

Indeed, we’ve carved a lot of things into our hearts seeking to become so certain of the necessity of each that we each live for such different things that we’re so afraid that we just resort to hate and hostility when faced with any who might be right in their saying we’re not.

Like Jesus.

Man came to free us and we killed Him.

Because He was right about our being anything but.

Just couldn’t see it that way because our eyes had become so blind to the truth that our hearts became filled with hate of the same.

Which is why God promised long before even Jesus came that there’d come a day in which He would so renew everything that we’d even be given new hearts so equipped unto the call to be holy that even the tablets carved with the Commandments wouldn’t be needed anymore as we’d all rather house the Law inside our hearts, our minds, our eyes and there live lives that seek to live life rather than just continue losing it alongside those losing it in what are new ways still every day.

Which is why I wonder why we’re all still so worried about all this stuff so worldly.

Why do so many things matter so much? What can it possibly benefit us to continue on living as if the law of this land as is written to only be changed as needed is somehow just as needed as His is? Even His Word asks this! Why, if we’re not of this world, do we still try so hard to adhere to what is a worldly law crafted of the created’s expectations when we rather have the utter simplicity of God’s Commandments right there still willing to help us live a life worth living?

Why do we still adhere to what are mere human traditions when the overall tradition of humans is that they sin until they die?

Is that what we should want to accomplish with our lives? To do nothing but whatever we want until we’re so engorged with the debt that all sin wins that our hearts just give out? To run so wild and carefree through this land of increasing captivity to every promiscuity that we ourselves become nothing but whores to every worldly craving there is? To so set aside the better He created us to be and calls us now to again in Him become that we instead become only numb to the hope that better is possible at all?

Do we truly want nothing more than to further the fall and laugh as we do it?

Because that’s what we see most here doing. Indeed, many here have chosen to live as if nothing in life matters all that much, as if nothing means all that much. Folks all around are just continually being tossed around like ships at sea seeking for the things that tomorrow will tell them they need. Is that what we want? To live a life always assuming that we need something else just because we want something more?

Is contentment with holiness truly such the enemy that we need to so continually drown it to death with our every depraved delight that we eventually lose the fight and succumb to the way of life that demands we die?

Is death truly what we want to win in the end?

For again, because of all we’ve done that we never should have did, we will all die once.

Problem is that if we continue to do as we’ve always done, thus showing He who is the Son that we just loved our way of life more than He who is the Way to the Life, well, He will have clearly heard that we love the death of sin so much that He will let us die it again.

And again.

And again.

And we see this every single day already in what is a world growing colder, darker, less hopeful and more hostile.

And yet we still apparently struggle to see the necessity of new hearts being given at the obvious expense of the old ones leaving. An obviousness proven in that none of us can have two hearts. Much the same as none of us can live two lives because none of us can serve two masters as we’ll love the one and hate the other or simply determine to honor more one than the other.

Either way, this life is one proven in the choices we make as are now being made every single day in what is an ongoing response to the choice He had made and promised to keep and has now kept in which He offers unto those who are dead the opportunity of repentance which leads unto the promise of our sharing in the resurrection of He who came to overcome the death that had overcome our better judgment.

All in order to encourage us to better choices than continuing to listen to the voices, be them ours or those of those around us, who seem to speak in only death as only sin is all that so many want to win.

Why?

Friends, what’s so grand about losing a life to the glitz and gloom of a world with plenty of room just none for Jesus?

And having each of us lived a life striving to be found among them who share that thought, haven’t we yet seen enough to welcome in us the receiving of a new heart that’s been remade with a desire only to please the Father, to honor the Son, to uphold the Law and find in all the above the promise of life forevermore?

There is nothing this world is doing or actively inviting us to do with them that can do for us what He did. Nothing. Rather everything here is only a distraction from the vital necessity of a law that we don’t seek to change when it gets hard but rather the Law which seeks to change us because hard is what our hearts have become.

Look, the point is that we’ve clearly forgotten who we are as we daily seem to do something new and yet nothing better. We are a people who make resolutions but no changes. We rather enjoy resting on laurels already won assuming then that we’re already done and can do no better.

Do you really believe that you can’t do anything any better? Can you look at the world we’re living in and honestly not see any reason for Jesus to flip life as we’ve known it upside down? Can you not look back on all those times that you lived to please people by doing things that you now regret having done and see no need to welcome the Son to remove from you everything you’ve become?

Can you not see what’s become of God’s people and realize that we need to come apart from the crowd if we’re to ever again be found as God’s people?

This place isn’t what He created it to be because we’ve been living as anything but what He created us to be. Time to change that.

Good News is that He both promised to help us accomplish just that and in fact already has.

Question is will we let Him change it for us, change it in us?

Will we help Him help us by tearing our hearts away from wherever we’ve given them to go and ask Him to make them new?

He will, but to so come apart from what we’ve become is a choice we have to choose.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold